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Report 1478
Report #1478 Skillset: Tracking Skill: Disarm Org: Serenguard Status: Completed Apr 2016 Furies' Decision: Solution 1+2. Problem: Traps, most concerningly pits, last indefinitely in a room until disarmed by an opposing tracker. DISARM has two syntaxes available to it. Regular DISARM may disarm the trap at a balance loss of 2 seconds, however comes with the chance of tripping the trap and suffering its ill effects. Currently, if the tracker who placed the pit happens to be online, your fingers will 'slip' (which costs balance) and then you fall into the pit. If the tracker is offline, you do not fall into the pit, but instead your fingers will 'slip' and you lose 4 seconds of balance. Falling into a pit leaves it in FIRED status which means you can conceal it once you emerge. One also can deliberately TRIP a trap to simply fall into it, lose the balance loss on trip and then emerge from the pit to conceal over the now FIRED pit. As an alternative, the syntax DISARM CAREFULLY was introduced which currently costs 2 power and guarantees disarming of the pit. The current mechanics present some problems, however. (1) If an ally has an area pre-pitted and not present, the tracker must expend considerable amounts of time OR power to remove their traps before being able to place down their own pits. (2) Cleaning up an enemy's traps when not fighting takes a lot of power OR a lot of time. For reference, a completely pitted Faethorn can take me an entire hour to disarm and re-pit. This is unneeded tedium that adds nothing enjoyable to the game, and further, allows trackers who are not even online to exert a hindering effect that is not warranted. Laying a pit down costs 2 seconds in each direction and a minimum commodity cost (which coal artifact owners don't even need to pay). By contrast, tripping a trap and reconcealing it could take as long as 11 seconds per trap and spending 2 power per trap is excessively costly and hindering when considering reserve regeneration. The solutions below are offered and intended to all be considered together. 0 R: 0 Solution #1: Repurpose the MARK ability in tracking. When a trap is marked, your allies can not only see it, but can also CONCEAL (or new syntax) over your traps regardless of its fired status. In this way, they need not disarm your traps later. 0 R: 0 Solution #2: Reduce the power cost on DISARM CAREFULLY to 1 power. 0 R: 0 Solution #3: Add in a decay time for pits if placed in territory that is not within the trapper's organization. I suggest 4 hours at this time. In this way, trackers need to constantly be proactive about pre-pitting an area, rather than have traps be active for weeks at a time. Alternatively, have the pits deactivate over this time and simply require reconcealing rather than disarming. Player Comments: ---on 4/6 @ 11:47 writes: Solution #4: If the person who laid down the traps originally is offline or not in the local area, have those traps always succeed on DISARM. Keep the trip chance if the tracker is still within the area, allowing for DISARM CAREFULLY to be used in these instances. ---on 4/6 @ 22:48 writes: I must note that the original report got deleted and so all of my comments against the proposal as initially stated went away. I will still state that I emphatically disagree with problem #2 in this report. It is not a problem. Traps are very powerful. They absolutely should take time to deal with if you want to take them over and replace them to give your team the advantage that they can provide. I am quite happy to spend my time taking over pits to give my side an advantage (and am, in fact, doing it as I write this!). If you take over someone's traps, they have to spend the same amount of time to replace and take it over. It is absolutely the choice -of the tracker- whether they feel it is worth the time to invest. I feel that it is, which is (obviously) why I do it. This "problem" is simply Not A Problem, and attempting to address it simply opens the door to abuse from the other side (making it too easy for raiders to take over an area with a powerful advantage). ---on 4/6 @ 22:58 writes: That said, your solutions have changed somewhat. I can see a point to Solution 1. It makes it so that traps in a defending area are not locked specifically to one person and another defending tracker does not have to do the whole disarm/rearm routine. It should require being mutual allies, however (along with the trap being marked). I don't see a need for solution 2-- it's still using power. It just means you can go a bit longer before running out. I can't say I'm -strongly- opposed to that one, but I just don't see a compelling need to make disarming traps easier than it currently is. Solution 3 I am adamantly opposed to, however. That is the most severe & overreacting "solution" offered to this "problem" yet-- it means that any time, anywhere, you have the ability to cover an entire area with pits with no significant time delay (as long as someone else didn't do it within the previous 4 hours). I strongly feel that if you want the advantage that pits can offer, you should be willing to invest the time to gain that advantage. ---on 4/6 @ 23:05 writes: Also 100% opposed to Solution 4, for the same reasons as 3 and my first comment. So: TL/DR, Solution 1 only, making sure it requires Mutual Allies. ---on 4/6 @ 23:31 writes: I can get on board with solution 1, allies shouldn't hinder your abilities to fight, and they likely are willing to have their traps be useful rather than wasted while they are not around. I could reasonably see pits made with solstice coal decay after a time, but pits that use coal should remain, and then there should a syntax to allow the use of comms. I'm not a fan of the other solutions for the reasons stated in the previous report. ---on 4/7 @ 00:31 writes: I really don't support this report in the context of how strong pits are. They shouldn't be easy, cheap, and quick to replace On the surface, solution 3 sounds okay until you consider removing pits first before establishing a fortress takes time, and I think it's important to keep that. Having instant access to area wide pits for every domoth or revolt or wildnodes just exacerbates the fortress meta. Pitting shouldn't be easy, it shouldn't be cheap. They are really freaking powerful. Right now the only counter to pits are someone else's pits. I think the lack of counters justifies the cost and time. ---on 4/7 @ 00:33 writes: Admittedly I am torn about solution 3. On the one hand, it eliminates some of the current issues with pits, walking into an area and the enemy already having a semi fortress set up. On the other hand, it makes turning domoths and nodes and what not into fortresses easier for whoever arrives first. I dunno. ---on 4/8 @ 12:48 writes: I'd support solution 1, 2 and/or 4. Solution 3 might be a bit hard of area- pitters, which remains a strategic decision, takes time and comms, just to have those burst to bubbles in a few hours. If we wanted them to decay, we might consider lessening the effort/cost for putting them up. In any case solution 1 allowing it to be used by allies is alright, and disarm carefully which still costs time and power may make it a better match now, given that putting up a trap costs time and comms (definitely a lesser 'resource' than power). Solution 4 is alright as well, since those would still take time, making it match with pit-setting, and can only be done on the condition that the setter is not around. ---on 4/8 @ 14:39 writes: I'm most in favor of Sol. 1 or 2. Although I agree with Xenthos that Sol. 1 should require mutual allies. I think a potential alternative to sol. 3 would be to have demesnes/pits/etc. scrubbed at the beginning of village revolts/domoths/etc. (I thought some mechanic like this was introduced but now I can't remember.) ---on 4/10 @ 01:13 writes: Support for solution 1 with mutual allies. ---on 4/21 @ 05:49 writes: I support solution #1 with the caveat that it includes all current mutual allies. ---on 4/23 @ 21:20 writes: If the issue is that pits are too quick and easy to replace/place, then the solution is to make it take longer to place pits, not to keep it taking forever to remove them. All four presented solutions are fine by me, consider a solution 5 making pits take a short time to dig to address Xenthos, Synkarin, and Cyndarin's concerns if that's the issue here. ---on 4/23 @ 21:24 writes: Also, an analogue to Environment - Perceive or Discernment - Hexes, showing traps in your room and who owns them would be very welcome. Give it the standard eq cost (4s) if there are concerns. ---on 4/23 @ 21:35 writes: Pits already take a short time to put down, so not sure what you're getting at there. I still strongly feel that pit mechanics are fine as-is as long as pits remain as strong/powerful as they currently are. Can't see an issue with people being able to check traps in the room though. ---on 4/23 @ 23:40 writes: In regards to solution 1, the intention is for mutual allies, yes. I envisoned that as long as a trap is marked, a mutual ally can use a new command syntax to take over control of the trap with the same balance time as CONCEAL. ---on 4/23 @ 23:40 writes: My personal preference for this report is solutions 1 combined with solutions 3 and 4. I clearly disagree with the assertion that there is no problem here. In fact, if anything, this report unfortunately is not being aggressive enough with the many issues regarding traps and disarming them. The time/power taken to disarm and replace traps is not acceptable, even less so when the tracker is not present or even online. Being completely absent should not allow you to exert this level of hindering. I am also puzzled by the assertion that the relevant solutions are being rejected because 'pits are so strong'. If pits are so powerful, logically they shouldn't be so unilaterally difficult to remove. I don't follow the logic. In any case, there is talk of not wanting for traps to be easily replaceable as long as 'pits are so strong', but the discussion is lacking on relevant points as to why that is, and what conditional changes to pits would make this acceptable. ---on 4/24 @ 01:22 writes: The time / power spent to deal with pits is absolutely acceptable, once again said as the person who spends the most time doing it. And no, logically, if you make it easier to remove pits when people are not around you are making it easier for an invader / aggressor to quickly and easily put their own pits in an area and give their side a fast boost. As far as the "discussion lacking relevant points on why that's an issue," that is *entirely your own fault*. I wrote pages and pages explaining this on the previous iteration of this report and you *deleted* all my comments. It is absolutely absurd to delete all of my comments and then complain that they are no longer there. Come on. ---on 4/24 @ 01:33 writes: Hard pass on solution 1, it just makes pits easier to change hands between trackers. Which is absurd. Would you make melds exchangeable between allies? Hell no. ---on 4/24 @ 01:54 writes: @Cyndarin: Melds are dissolvable. Traps are not. Especially when 1329 is completed, you will never run into a situation where you would need to break an absent ally's meld before placing your own. ---on 4/24 @ 01:58 writes: @Xenthos: I deleted the entire report because my problem statement and solution approaches were different to the previous draft. In addition, many of the comments were beginning to become polluted with conversation regarding the coal artifacts and other things I should have better left out of my problem statement. If you felt like your voice and salient points not stated here were lost in my purging of the report, please re-comment them. The discussion I specifically want more clarification on is what individually about pits justifies the current disarm dynamics, and what (if any) changes should be done to pits to make changes to disarming more palatable? ---on 4/24 @ 02:35 writes: I stated in the previous report that got deleted my thoughts on that-- I believe that pits are very strong. They can hit any enemy who walks in, the enemy finds themselves locked in the room for at least a couple of seconds (giving a group time to start afflicting and holding them in place). In group combat, they can take enemy forces out of play for useful periods of time (gusting, fearaura, even staticfield-- anything that pushes you out of the room can trigger it both on exit into an adjacent pitted room and return back into the pitted combat fighting room). It is a crowd control ability. It has enormous strength and capability and can sway a fight. This is also one of the main purposes to being a tracker-- pits and springtraps. I do not feel that weakening pits is called for. They are an essential component and essentially make the skillset useful. However, as long as they are this strong, they should -not- be able to be flipped willy-nilly (again, something that I went into in great depth on the previous report that you decided did not deserve to be saved). I'm not sure why you think that we need to re-write the same things over and over and over again just because you put some comments in that took things off-track. My comments in the original report were as relevant to this discussion as they were to that one because they are the same discussion. ---on 4/24 @ 02:38 writes: In addition, the solutions are almost entirely the same with the addition of solution #3 (which goes further) and solution #1 (which I am fine with). Other than that, there are no real changes. You could easily have just put solution 1 in place of one of the others. The problem presented really did not change much at all, it is the same thrust... so I'm just at a loss on that. I really wish you had just left it as-is because wiping out all of our thoughts leaves us here, where we've already -made- our arguments and now they are gone (with us being frustrated). ---on 4/24 @ 18:21 writes: I'm having a hard time seeing why it's suddenly such an issue that disarm/trip or whatever takes so long. The only argument for making it shorter that I've heard from Rivius seems more of a 'I don't want to have it take so long to disarm, so I'm envoying it to take less time' rather than it being any actual balance concerns. Please explain why the tracker being offline should suddenly make it so much easier to disarm traps and why it's a balance concern. Why is it fair to make it easier if the tracker is offline than if they are online. You are obviously sitting here stating that if the tracker is online, the time it takes is fair, but why is it suddenly unfair if they are offline? I don't think being online or offline should make a difference in how long it takes to disarm traps, so given that you've stated the time is fair when the tracker is online, I think it's only fair to keep things as they are. The only solution I'm really behind is #1. The rest can be ignored. (Also, I have no idea what Enyalida is on about, making traps take longer to put up than disarm is incredibly illogical, why change it all then?) ---on 4/25 @ 03:51 writes: Agreed w/ Xenthos on this one. Solution 1 with mutual ally required. Traps are a pain for a reason, they should be a pain to the person wanting to change them out as much as they are to the person falling into them. Type MORE to continue reading. (53% shown)